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THE ROMANES LECTURE 

1910 

BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 
IN HISTORY 



BY 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



DELIVERED 

BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 

JUNE 7TH, I9IO 



OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

AMERICAN BRANCH 

35 WEST 32D STREET, NEW YORK 

LONDON : HENRY FROWDE 
I9IO 



y\^ 



Copyright, 1910, by 

Oxford University Press 

American Branch 



CC!.A26r)582 



IRomanee ILecture 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 
IN HISTORY 

An American who, in response to such an invitation as 
I have received, speaks in this university of ancient re- 
nown, cannot but feel with pecuHar vividness the interest 
and charm of his surroundings, fraught as they are with 
a thousand associations. Your great universities, and all 
the memories that make them great, are living realities in 
the minds of scores of thousands of men who have never 
seen them and who dwell across the seas in other 
lands. Moreover, these associations are no stronger in 
the men of English stock than in those who are not. My 
people have been for eight generations in America; but 
in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, 
rather than like many of the Americans of to-day; for I 
have in my veins the blood of men who came from many 
different European races. The ethnic make-up of our 
people is slowly changing so that constantly the race tends 
to become more and more akin to that of those Americans 
who like myself are of the old stock but not mainly of 
English stock. Yet I think that, as time goes by, mutual 
respect, understanding, and sympathy among the English- 
speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my 
ancestors, Holland or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, 
who had come to Oxford in 'the spacious days of great 
Elizabeth,' would have felt far more alien than I, their 
descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the things of 



4 Biological Analogies in History 

the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in 
the things of the body. 

More than ever before in the world's history we of 
to-day seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries 
that surround not only mankind but all life, both in the 
present and the past. We search, we peer, we see 
things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear 
vision, as we look before and after. We study the 
tremendous procession of the ages, from the immemo- 
rial past when in 'cramp elf and saurian forms' the 
creative forces 'swathed their too-much power,' down 
to the yesterday, a few score thousand years distant 
only, when the history of man became the overwhelming 
fact in the history of life on this planet; and studying, 
we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and 
death, of birth, growth, and change, between those 
physical groups of animal life which we designate as 
species, forms, races, and the highly complex and com- 
posite entities which rise before our minds when we 
speak of nations and civilizations. 

It is this study which has given science its present- 
day prominence. In the world of intellect, doubtless, 
the most marked features in the history of the past cen- 
tury have been the extraordinary advances in scientific 
knowledge and investigation, and in the position held 
by the men of science with reference to those engaged 
in other pursuits. I am not now speaking of applied 
science; of the science, for instance, which, having revo- 
lutionized transportation on the earth and the water, 
is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the 
science that finds its expression in such extraordinary 
achievements as the telephone and the telegraph ; of 
the sciences which have so accelerated the velocity of 
movement in social and industrial conditions — for the 



Biological Analogies in History 5 

changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary life 
during the last three generations have been greater 
than in all the preceding generations since history 
dawned. I speak of the science which has no more 
direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life than 
literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or 
history. A hundred years ago the ordinary man of 
cultivation had to know something of these last subjects ; 
but the probabilities were rather against his having any 
but the most superficial scientific knowledge. At present 
all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in sci- 
entific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, 
and the rapidity with which ideas originating among 
students of the most advanced and abstruse sciences be- 
come, at least partially, domiciled in the popular mind. 

Another feature of the change, of the growth in the 
position of science in the eyes of every one, and of 
the greatly increased respect naturally resulting for scien- 
tific methods, has been a certain tendency for scientific 
students to encroach on other fields. This is particu- 
larly true of the field of historical study. Not only have 
scientific men insisted upon the necessity of consider- 
ing the history of man, especially in its early stages, in 
connexion with what biology shows to be the history 
of life, but furthermore there has arisen a demand that 
history shall itself be treated as a science. Both 
positions are in their essence right; but as regards 
each position the more arrogant among the invaders of 
the new realm of knowledge take an attitude to which 
it is not necessary to assent. As regards the latter of 
the two positions, that which would treat history hence- 
forth merely as one branch of scientific study, we must 
of course cordially agree that accuracy in recording 
facts and appreciation of their relative worth and inter- 



6 Biological Analogies in History 

relationship are just as necessary in historical study as 
in any other kind of study. The fact that a book, 
thoue^h interestins:, is untrue, of course removes it at once 
from the category of history, however much it may still 
deserve to retain a place in the always desirable group 
of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction. But 
the converse also holds, at least to the extent of per- 
mitting us to insist upon what would seem to be the 
elementary fact that a book which is written to be read 
should be readable. This rather obvious truth seems 
to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous 
scientific historians, who apparently hold that the worth 
of a historical book is directly in proportion to the 
impossibility of reading it, save as a painful duty. Now 
I am willing that history shall be treated as a branch 
of science, but only on condition that it also remains 
a branch of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that 
as the field of science encroaches on the field of 
literature there should be a corresponding encroach- 
ment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of 
the great needs, which can only be met by very able 
men whose culture is broad enough to include literature 
as well as science, is the need of books for scientific 
laymen. We need a literature of science which shall 
be readable. So far from doing away with the school 
of great historians, the school of Polybius and Tacitus, 
Gibbon and Macaulay, we need merely that the future 
writers of history, without losing the qualities which 
have made these men great, shall also utilize the new 
facts and new methods which science has put at their 
disposal. Dryness is not in itself a measure of value. 
No 'scientific' treatise about St. Louis will displace 
Joinville, for the very reason that Joinville's place is in 
both history and literature; no minute study of the 



Biological Analogies in History 7 

Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot — and 
Marbot is as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, 
certain at least of the branches of science should like- 
wise be treated by masters in the art of presentment, 
so that the layman interested in science, no less than 
the layman interested in history, shall have on his 
shelves classics which can be read. Whether this wish 
be or be not capable of realization, it assuredly re- 
mains true that the great historian of the future must 
essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great 
historians of the past. The industrious collector of facts 
occupies an honourable, but not an exalted, position, and 
the scientific historian who produces books which are not 
literature must rest content with the honour, substantial, 
but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who 
gathers material which some time some great master 
shall arise to use. 

Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the 
masters of literature, we must insist upon the historian 
of mankind working in the scientific spirit, and using 
the treasure-houses of science. He who would fully 
treat of man must know at least something of biology, 
of the science that treats of living, breathing things; 
and especially of that science of evolution which is 
inseparably connected with the great name of Darwin. 
Of course there is no exact parallelism between the 
birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world, 
and the birth, growth, and death of societies in the 
world of man. Yet there is a certain parallelism. 
There are strange analogies ; it may be that there are 
homologies. 

How far the resemblances between the two sets of 
phenomena are more than accidental, how far biology 
can be used as an aid in the interpretation of human 



8 Biological Analogies in History 

history, we cannot at present say. The historian should 
never forget, what the highest type of scientific man 
is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to 
admit ignorance is a prime factor in developing wisdom 
out of knowledge. Wisdom is advanced by research 
which enables us to add to knowledge; and, moreover, 
the way for wisdom is made ready when men who 
record facts of vast but unknown import, if asked 
to explain their full significance, are willing frankly to 
answer that they do not know. The research which 
enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge 
stands first; but second only stands the research which, 
while enabling us clearly to pose the problem, also re- 
quires us to say that with our present knowledge we can 
offer no complete solution. 

Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two 
taken from one of the most fascinating branches of 
world-history, the history of the higher forms of life, of 
mammalian life, on this globe. 

Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the 
length of time necessary for the changes that have taken 
place. At any rate, many hundreds of thousands of 
years, some millions of years, have passed by since in the 
eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we find 
the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed 
mammalian life on the land masses out of which have 
grown the continents as we see them to-day. The ages 
swept by, until, with the advent of man substantially in 
the physical shape in which we now know him, we also 
find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind, 
though widely differing in distribution, from that of the 
present day. Throughout this immense period form 
succeeds form, type succeeds type, in obedience to laws 
of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of develop- 



Biological Analogies in History 9 

ment and death, which we as yet understand only in the 
most imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our 
wisdom is often turned into foolishness, and many of the 
phenomena of evolution, which seemed clearly explic- 
able to the learned master of science who founded these 
lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily 
explained. The scientific men of most note now differ 
widely in their estimates of the relative parts played 
in evolution by natural selection, by mutation, by the 
inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study 
their writings with a growing impression that there are 
forces at work which our blinded eyes wholly fail to 
apprehend; and where this is the case the part of 
wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and such 
partial explanations, but, that we are not warranted in 
saying that we have the whole explanation. In tracing 
the history of the development of faunal life during this 
period, the age of mammals, there are some facts which 
are clearly established, some great and sweeping changes 
for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons. There 
are other facts as to which we grope in the dark, and 
vast changes, vast catastrophes, of which we can give 
no adequate explanation. 

Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two 
matters of terminology. In the changes, the develop- 
ment and extinction, of species we must remember that 
such expressions as *a new species,' or as 'a species 
becoming extinct,' are each commonly and indiscrim- 
inately used to express totally different and opposite 
meanings. Of course the 'new' species is not new in 
the sense that its ancestors appeared later on the globe's 
surface than those of any old species tottering to extinc- 
tion. Phylogenetically, each animal now living must 
necessarily trace its ancestral descent back through 



10 Biological Analogies in History 

countless generations, through aeons of time, to the 
early stages of the appearance of life on the globe. All 
that we mean by a 'new' species is that from some 
cause, or set of causes, one of these ancestral stems 
slowly or suddenly develops into a form unlike any that 
has preceded it; so that while in one form of life the 
ancestral type is continuously repeated and the old species 
continues to exist, in another form of life there is a 
deviation from the ancestral type and a new species ap- 
pears. 

Similarly, 'extinction of species' is a term which has 
two entirely different meanings. The type may become 
extinct by dying out and leaving no descendants. Or 
it may die out because, as the generations go by, there 
is "change, slow or swift, until a new form is produced. 
Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. 
In the other case it changes into something different. 
The huge titanothere, and the small three-toed horse, 
both existed at what may roughly be called the same 
period of the world's history, back in the middle of the 
mammalian age. Both are extinct in the sense that 
each has completely disappeared and that nothing like 
either is to be found in the world to-day. But whereas 
all the individual titanotheres finally died out, leaving 
no descendants, a number of the three-toed horses did 
leave descendants, and these descendants, constantly 
changing as the ages went by, finally developed into the 
highly specialized one-toed horses, asses, and zebras of 
to-day. 

The analogy between the facts thus indicated and 
certain facts in the development of human societies is 
striking. A further analogy is supplied by a very 
curious tendency often visible in cases of intense and 
extreme specialization. When an animal form becomes 



Biological A nalogies in History 1 1 

highly speciaHzed, the type at first, because of its 
specialization, triumphs over its allied rivals and its 
enemies, and attains a great development; until in many 
cases the specialization becomes so extreme that from 
some cause unknown to us, or at which we merely guess, 
it disappears. The new species which mark a new era 
commonly come from the less specialized types, the less 
distinctive, dominant, and striking types, of the preced- 
ing era. 

When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, 
which divide one period of palaeontological history from 
another, we can sometimes assign causes, and again we 
cannot even guess at them. In the case of single species, 
or of faunas of very restricted localities, the explana- 
tion is often self-evident. A comparatively slight change 
in the amount of moisture in the climate, with the at- 
tendant change in vegetation, might readily mean the de- 
struction of a group of huge herbivores wath a bodily size 
such that they needed a vast quantity of food, and with 
teeth so weak or so peculiar that but one or two kinds 
of plants could furnish this food. Again, w^e now know 
that the most deadly foes of the higher forms of life 
are various lower forms of life, such as insects, or micro- 
scopic creatures conveyed into the blood by insects. 
There are districts in South America where many large 
animals, wild and domestic, cannot live because of the 
presence either of certain ticks or of certain baleful flies. 
In Africa there is a terrible genus of poison fly, each 
species acting as the host of microscopic creatures which 
are deadly to certain of the higher vertebrates. One of 
these species, though harmless to man, is fatal to all 
domestic animals, and this although harmless to the 
closely-related wild kinsfolk of these animals. Another 
is fatal to man himself, being the cause of the 'sleeping 



12 Biological Analogies in History 

sickness/ which in many large districts has killed out the 
entire population. Of course the development or the ex- 
tension of the range of any such insects, and any one of 
many other causes which we see actually at work around 
us, would readily account for the destruction of some 
given species or even for the destruction of several species 
in a limited area of country. 

When whole faunal groups die out, over large areas, 
the question is different, and may or may not be sus- 
ceptible of explanation with the knowledge we actually 
possess. In the old arctogaeal continent, for instance, 
in what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, the 
glacial period made a complete, but of course explicable, 
change in the faunal life of the region. At one time 
the continent held a rich and varied fauna. Then a 
period of great cold supervened, and a different fauna 
succeeded the first. The explanation of the change is 
obvious. 

But in many other cases we cannot so much as 
hazard a guess at why a given change occurred. One 
of the most striking instances of these inexplicable 
changes is that afforded by the history of South 
America toward the close of the tertiary period. For 
ages South America had been an island by itself, cut 
off from North America at the very time that the latter 
was at least occasionally in land communication with 
Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up 
in South America, some of the types resembling nothing 
now existing, while others are recognizable as ancestral 
forms of the ant-eaters, sloths, and armadillos of to-day. 
It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian fauna, of, 
on the whole, rather small species, and without any 
representatives of the animals with which man has been 
most familiar during his career on this earth. 



Biological Analogies in History 13 

Towards the end of the tertiary period there was an up- 
heaval of land between this old South American island 
and North America, near what is now the Isthmus of 
Panama, thereby making a bridge across which the 
teeming animal life of the northern continent had access 
to this queer southern continent. There followed an 
inrush of huge, or swift, or formidable creatures which 
had attained their development in the fierce competition 
of the arctogaeal realm. Elephants, camels, horses, 
tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves, 
bears, deer, crowded into South America, warring each 
against the other incomers and against the old long- 
existing forms. A riot of life followed. Not only was 
the character of the South American fauna totally 
changed by the invasion of these creatures from the 
north, which soon swarmed over the continent, but it 
was also changed through the development wrought in 
the old inhabitants by the severe competition to which 
they were exposed. Many of the smaller or less capable 
types died out. Others developed enormous bulk or 
complete armour protection, and thereby saved them- 
selves from the new beasts. In consequence. South 
America soon became populated with various new species 
of mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, camels, horses, deer, 
cats, wolves, hooved creatures of strange shapes and 
some of them of giant size, all of these being descended 
from the immigrant types; and side by side with them 
there grew up large autochthonous ungulates, giant 
ground sloths wellnigh as large as elephants, and ar- 
moured creatures as bulky as an ox but structurally of 
the armadillo or ant-eater type ; and some of these latter 
not only held their own, but actually in their turn wan- 
dered north over the isthmus and invaded North America. 
A fauna as varied as that of Africa to-day, as abundant 



14 Biological Analogies in History 

in species and individuals, even more noteworthy, because 
of its huge size or odd type, and because of the terrific 
prowess of the more formidable flesh-eaters, was thus 
developed in South America, and flourished for a period 
which human history would call very long indeed, but 
which geologically was short. 

Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction 
fell on this fauna. All the great and terrible creatures 
died out, the same fate befalling the changed representa- 
tives of the old autochthonous fauna and the descendants 
of the migrants that had come down from the north. 
Ground sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and 
mastodon, and all the associated animals of large size, 
vanished, and South America, though still retaining its 
connexion with North America, once again became a 
land with a mammalian life small and weak compared 
to that of North America and the Old World. Its fauna 
is now marked, for instance, by the presence of medium- 
sized deer and cats, fox-like wolves, and small camel-like 
creatures, as well as by the presence of small armadillos, 
sloths, and ant-eaters. In other words, it includes 
diminutive representatives of the giants of the preced- 
ing era, both of the giants among the older forms of 
mammalia, and of the giants among the new and intrusive 
kinds. The change was widespread and extraordinary, 
and with our present means of information it is wholly 
inexplicable. There was no ice age, and it is hard to 
imagine any cause which would account for the extinc- 
tion of so many species of huge or moderate size, while 
smaller representatives, and here and there medium-sized 
representatives, of many of them were left. 

Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of 
species, there are, if not homologies, at least certain 
analogies, in the history of human societies, in the 



Biological Analogies in History 15 

history of the rise to prominence, of the development 
and change, of the temporary dominance, and death or 
transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form 
races or nations. Here, as in biology, it is necessary to 
keep in mind that we use each of the words 'birth' and 
'death,' 'youth' and 'age,' often very loosely, and some- 
times as denoting either one of two totally different con- 
ceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no such thing 
as an 'old' or a 'young' nation, any more than there is an 
'old' or 'young' family. -Phylogenetically, the line of 
ancestral descent must be of exactly the same length for 
every existing individual, and for every group of indi- 
viduals, whether forming a family or a nation. All that 
can properly be meant by the terms 'new' and 'young' is 
that in a given line of descent there has suddenly come a 
period of rapid change. This change may arise either 
from a new development or transformation of the old 
elements, or else from a new grouping of these elements 
with other and varied elements; so that the words 'new' 
nation or 'young' nation may have a real difference of 
significance in one case from what they have in another. 
As in biology, so in human history, a new form may 
result from the specialization of a long-existing, and 
hitherto very slowly changing, generalized or non-spe- 
cialized form ; as, for instance, occurs when a barbaric 
race from a variety of causes suddenly develops a more 
complex cultivation and civilization. This is what oc- 
curred, for instance, in Western Europe during the cen- 
turies of the Teutonic and, later, the Scandinavian ethnic 
overflows from the north. All the modern countries of 
Western Europe are descended from the states created 
by these northern invaders. When first created they 
would be called 'new' or 'young' states in the sense that 
part or all of the people composing them were descended 



1 6 Biological Analogies in History 

from races that hitherto had not been civilized, and that 
therefore, for the first time, entered on the career of 
civilized communities. In the southern part of Western 
Europe the new states thus formed consisted in bulk of 
the inhabitants already in the land under the Roman 
Empire; and it was here that the new kingdoms first 
took shape. Through a reflex action their influence then 
extended back into the cold forests from which the in- 
vaders had come, and Germany and Scandinavia wit- 
nessed the rise of communities with essentially the same 
civilization as their southern neighbours ; though in those 
communities, unlike the southern communities, there was 
no infusion of new blood, so that the new civilized nations 
which gradually developed were composed entirely of 
members of the same races which in the same regions had 
for ages lived the life of a slowly changing barbarism. 
The same was true of the Slavs and the slavonized Finns 
of Eastern Europe, when an infiltration of Scandinavian 
leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine 
culture from the south, joined to produce the changes 
which have gradually, out of the little Slav communities 
of the forest and the steppe, formed the mighty Russian 
Empire of to-day. 

Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting 
off from a long established, highly developed and special- 
ized nation. In this case the nation is usually spoken of 
as a 'young,' and is correctly spoken of as a 'new,' nation; 
but the term should always be used with a clear sense of 
the difference between what is described in such case, and 
what is described by the same term in speaking of a 
civilized nation just developed from barbarism. Carthage 
and Syracuse were new cities compared to Tyre and 
Corinth ; but the Greek or Phoenician race was in every 
sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old city. 



Biological Analogies in History ly 

So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community 
compared with England or Scotland; but the ancestral 
type of civilization and culture is as old in one case as in 
the other. I of course do not mean for a moment that 
great changes are not produced by the mere fact that the 
old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings 
where it has again to go through the work of taming the 
wilderness, a work finished many centuries before in the 
original home of the race; I merely mean that the ances- 
tral history is the same in each case. We can rightly use 
the phrase 'a new people,' in speaking of Canadians or 
Australians, Americans or Afrikanders. But we use it in 
an entirely different sense from that in which we use it 
when speaking of such communities as those founded by 
the Northmen and their descendants during that period 
of astonishing growth which saw the descendants of the 
Norse sea-thieves conquer and transform Normandy, 
Sicily and the British Islands; we use it in an entirely 
different sense from that in which we use it when speak- 
ing of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief, 
Novgorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the 
steppes and the marshy forests struggled haltingly and 
stumblingly upward to become builders of cities and to 
form stable governments. The kingdoms of Charle- 
magne and Alfred were 'new,' compared to the empire 
on the Bosphorus ; they were also in every way different ; 
their lines of ancestral descent had nothing in common 
with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the 
Caesars of Byzantium; their social problems and after- 
time history were totally different. This is not true of 
those 'new' nations which spring direct from old nations. 
Brazil, the Argentine, the United States, are all 'new' 
nations, compared with the nations of Europe; but, with 
whatever changes in detail, their civilization is neverthe- 



1 8 Biological A nalogies in History 

less of the general European type, as shown in Portugal, 
Spain, and England. The differences between these 'new' 
American and these 'old' European nations are not as 
great as those which separate the 'new' nations one from 
another, and the 'old' nations one from another. There 
are in each case very real differences between the new and 
the old nation ; differences both for good and for evil ; 
but in each case there is the same ancestral history to 
reckon with, the same type of civilization, with its at- 
tendant benefits and shortcomings ; and, after the pioneer 
stages are passed, the problems to be solved, in spite of 
superficial differences, are in their essence the same; they 
are those that confront all civilized peoples, not those that 
confront only peoples struggling from barbarism into 
civilization. 

So, when we speak of the 'death' of a tribe, a nation, 
or a civilization, the term may be used for either one of 
two totally different processes, the analogy with what 
occurs in biological history being complete. Certain 
tribes of savages, the Tasmanians, for instance, and 
various little clans of American Indians, have within the 
last century or two completely died out; all of the indi- 
viduals have perished, leaving no descendants, and the 
blood has disappeared. Certain other tribes of Indians 
have as tribes disappeared or are now disappearing; but 
their blood remains, being absorbed into the veins of the 
white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those 
white intruders; so that in reality they are merely being 
transformed into something absolutely different from 
what they were. In the United States, in the new State 
of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Dela- 
wares, and other tribes, are in process of absorption into 
the mass of the white population; when the state was 
admitted a couple of years ago, one of the two senators, 



Biological Analogies in History 19 

and three of the five representatives in Congress, were 
partly of Indian blood. In but a few years these Indian 
tribes will have disappeared as completely as those that 
have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by 
absorption and transformation into the mass of the 
American population. 

A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the 
statement that a civilization has 'died out.' The nation- 
ality and culture of the wonderful city-builders of the 
lower Mesopotamian Plain have completely disappeared, 
and, though doubtless certain influences dating therefrom 
are still at work, they are in such changed and hidden 
form as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of 
the Roman Empire was of no such character. There was 
complete change, far-reaching transformation, and at one 
period a violent dislocation; but it would not be correct 
to speak either of the blood or the culture of old Rome as 
extinct. We are not yet in a position to dogmatize as to 
the permanence or evanescence of the various strains of 
blood that go to make up every civilized nationality; but 
it is reasonably certain that the blood of the old Roman 
still flows through the veins of the modern Italian ; and 
though there has been much intermixture, from many 
different foreign sources — from foreign conquerors and 
from foreign slaves — yet it is probable that the Italian 
type of to-day finds its dominant ancestral type in the 
ancient Latin. As for the culture, the civilization of 
Rome, this is even more true. It has suffered a complete 
transformation, partly by natural growth, partly by ab- 
sorption of totally alien elements, such as a Semitic re- 
ligion, and certain Teutonic governmental and social cus- 
toms ; but the process was not one of extinction, but one 
of growth and transformation, both from within and by 
the accretion of outside elements. In France and Spain 



20 Biological Analogies in History 

the inheritance of Latin blood is small; but the Roman 
culture which was forced on those countries has been tena- 
ciously retained by them, throughout all their subsequent 
ethnical and political changes, as the basis on which their 
civilizations have been built. Moreover, the permanent 
spreading of Roman influence was not limited to Europe. 
It has extended to and over half of that new world which 
was not even dreamed of during the thousand years of 
brilliant life between the birth and the death of Pagan 
Rome. This new world was discovered by one Italian, 
and its mainland first reached and named by another ; and 
in it, over a territory many times the size of Trajan's 
empire, the Spanish, French and Portuguese adventurers 
founded, beside the St. Lawrence and the Amazon, along 
the flanks of the Andes and in the shadow of the snow- 
capped volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the 
Straits of Magellan, communities, now flourishing and 
growing apace, which in speech and culture, and even as 
regards one strain in their blood, are the lineal heirs of 
the ancient Latin civilization. When we speak of the 
disappearance, the passing away, of ancient Babylon or 
Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we are using the same 
terms to describe totally different phenomena. 

The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize 
much more clearly than their predecessors of a couple 
of generations back how artificial most great nationalities 
are, and how loose is the terminology usually employed 
to describe them. There is an element of unconscious and 
rather pathetic humour in the simplicity of half a century 
ago which spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with 
reverential admiration, as if the words denoted, not 
merely something definite, but something ethnologically 
sacred ; the writers having much the same pride and faith 
in their own and their fellow countryman's purity of de- 



Biological Analogies in History 21 

scent from these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors 
that was felt a few generations earlier by the various 
noble families who traced their lineage direct to Odin, 
Aeneas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course, all students 
recognize that there may not be, and often is not, the 
slightest connexion between kinship in blood and kinship 
in tongue. In America we find three races, white, red, 
and black, and three tongues, English, French, and Span- 
ish, mingled in such a way that the lines of cleavage of 
race continually run at right angles to the lines of cleavage 
of speech; there being communities practically of pure 
blood of each race found speaking each language. Aryan 
and Teutonic are terms having very distinct linguistic 
meanings ; but whether they have any such ethnical mean- 
ings as were formerly attributed to them, is so doubtful 
that we cannot even be sure whether the ancestors of most 
of those we call Teutons originally spoke an Aryan tongue 
at all. The term Celtic, again, is perfectly clear when 
used linguistically; but when used to describe a race it 
means almost nothing until we find out which one of 
several totally different terminologies the writer or 
speaker is adopting. If, for instance, the term is used to 
designate the short-headed, medium-sized type common 
throughout middle Europe, from east to west, it denotes 
something entirely different from what is meant when 
the name is applied to the tall, yellow-haired opponents of 
the Romans and the later Greeks; while if used to desig- 
nate any modern nationality, it becomes about as loose 
and meaningless as the term Anglo-Saxon itself. 

Most of the great societies which have developed a high 
civilization and have played a dominant part in the world 
have been — and are — artificial ; not merely in social struc- 
ture, but in the sense of including totally different race 
types. A great nation rarely belongs to any one race, 



22 Biological Analogies in History 

though its citizens generally have one essentially national 
speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these great 
artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all 
the parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to 
move, go forward or go back, all together, in response to 
some stir or throbbing, very powerful, and yet not to be 
discerned by our senses. National unity is far more apt 
than race unity to be a fact to reckon with ; until indeed 
we come to race differences as fundamental as those 
which divide from one another the half-dozen great 
ethnic divisions of mankind, when they become so im- 
portant that differences of nationality, speech, and creed 
sink into littleness. 

An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples 
were divided according to their physical and racial char- 
acteristics, such as stature, coloration, and shape of head, 
would bear no resemblance whatever to a map giving 
the political divisions, the nationalities, of Europe; while 
on the contrary a linguistic map would show a general 
correspondence between speech and nationality. The 
northern Frenchman is in blood and physical type more 
nearly allied to his German-speaking neighbour than to 
the Frenchman of the Mediterranean seaboard; and the 
latter, in his turn, is nearer to the Catalan than to the 
man who dwells beside the Channel or along the tribu- 
taries of the Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in 
the qualities that tell in the make-up of a nationality, all 
these kinds of Frenchmen feel keenly that they are one, 
and are different from all outsiders, their differences 
dwindling into insignificance, compared with the extraor- 
dinary, artificially produced, resemblances which bring 
them together and wall them off from the outside world. 
The same is true when we compare the German who 
dwells where the Alpine springs of the Danube and the 



Biological Analogies in History 23 

Rhine interlace, with the physically different German of 
the Baltic lands. The same is true of Kentishman, Cor- 
nishman, and Yorkshireman in England. 

In dealing, not with groups of human beings in simple 
and primitive relations, but with highly complex, highly 
specialized, civilized, or semi-civilized societies, there is 
need of great caution in drawing analogies with what 
has occurred in the development of the animal world. 
Yet even in these cases it is curious to see how some of 
the phenomena in the growth and disappearance of these 
complex, artificial groups of human beings resemble what 
has happened in myriads of instances in the history of 
life on this planet. 

Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens are 
knit by a bond of speech and culture much more than by 
a bond of blood, show periods of extraordinary growth, 
and again of sudden or lingering decay? In some cases 
we can answer readily enough ; in other cases we cannot 
as yet even guess what the proper answer should be. If 
in any such case the centrifugal forces overcome the 
centripetal, the nation will of course fly to pieces, and the 
reason for its failure to become a dominant force is 
patent to every one. The minute that the spirit which 
finds its healthy development in local self-government, 
and is the antidote to the dangers of an extreme centraliza- 
tion, develops into mere particularism, into inability to 
combine effectively for achievement of a common end, 
then it is hopeless to expect great results. Poland and 
certain Republics of the western hemisphere are the 
standard examples of failure of this kind; and the United 
States would have ranked with them, and her name would 
have become a byword of derision, if the forces of union 
had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the growth of 
soft luxury after it has reached a certain point becomes 



24 Biological Analogies in History 

a national danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little 
of the vision of a seer to foretell what must happen in 
any community if the average woman ceases to become 
the mother of a family of healthy children, if the average 
man loses the will and the power to work up to old age 
and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely, 
commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character 
vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities 
atrophy, then the nation has lost what no material pros- 
perity can offset. 

But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or 
partially inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended 
downward when great slave-tilled farms spread over what 
had once been a country-side of peasant proprietors, when 
greed and luxury and sensuality ate like acids into the 
fibre of the upper classes, while the mass of the citizens 
grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but upon 
the state, for their pleasures and their very livelihood. 
But this does not explain why the forward movement 
stopped at different times, so far as different matters were 
concerned ; at one time as regards literature, at another 
time as regards architecture, at another time as regards 
city-building. There is nothing mysterious about Rome's 
dissolution at the time of the barbarian invasions; apart 
from the impoverishment and depopulation of the Em- 
pire, its fall would be quite sufficiently explained by the 
mere fact that the average citizen had lost the fighting 
edge, an essential even under a despotism, and therefore 
far more essential in free, self-governing communities 
such as those of the English-speaking peoples of to-day. 
The mystery is rather that out of the chaos and cor- 
ruption of Roman society during the last days of the 
oligarchic republic, there should have sprung an Empire 
able to hold things with reasonable steadiness for three 



Biological Analogies in History 25 

or four centuries. But why, for instance, should the 
higher kinds of Hterary productiveness have ceased about 
the beginning of the second century, whereas the follow- 
ing centuries witnessed a great outbreak of energy in the 
shape of city-building in the provinces, not only in West- 
ern Europe, but in Africa? We cannot even guess why 
the springs of one kind of energy dried up, while there 
was yet no cessation of another kind. 

Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland. 
For a period covering a little more than the seventeenth 
century, Holland, like some of the Italian city states at 
an earlier period, stood on the dangerous heights of great- 
ness, beside nations so vastly her superior in territory and 
population as to make it inevitable that sooner or later 
she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to 
which she had been raised by her own indomitable soul. 
Her fall came; it could not have been indefinitely post- 
poned; but it came far quicker than it needed to come, 
because of shortcomings on her part to which both Great 
Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed. 
Her government was singularly ineffective, the decen- 
tralization being such as often to permit the separatist, 
the particularist, spirit of the provinces to rob the central 
authority of all efficiency. This was bad enough. But 
the fatal weakness was that so common in rich, peace- 
loving societies, where men hate to think of war as possi- 
ble, and try to justify their own reluctance to face it 
either by high-sounding moral platitudes, or else by a 
philosophy of short-sighted materialism. The Dutch 
were very wealthy. They grew to believe that they 
could hire others to do their fighting for them on land; 
and on sea, where they did their own fighting, and fought 
very well, they refused in time of peace to make ready 
fleets so efficient, as either to insure them against the 



26 Biological Analogies in History 

peace being broken, or else to give them the victory when 
war came. To be opulent and unarmed is to secure ease 
in the present at the almost certain cost of disaster in the 
future. 

It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she 
did her position among the powers; but it is far more 
difficult to explain why at the same time there should 
have come at least a partial loss of position in the world 
of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire burned 
itself out in the national soul. As the line of great states- 
men, of great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, 
so the line of the great Dutch painters ended. The loss 
of pre-eminence in the schools followed the loss of pre- 
eminence in camp and in council chamber. 

In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire 
of Rome, it was not death which came, but transforma- 
tion. Both Holland and Italy teach us that races that 
fall may rise again. In Holland, as in the Scandinavian 
kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense 
no decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to 
what has befallen so many countries; no lowering of the 
general standard of well-being, no general loss of vitality, 
no depopulation. What happened was, first a flowering 
time, in which the country's men of action and men of 
thought gave it a commanding position among the nations 
of the day ; then this period of command passed, and the 
State revolved in an eddy, aside from the sweep of the 
mighty current of world life; and yet the people them- 
selves in their internal relations remained substantially 
unchanged, and in many fields of endeavour have now 
recovered themselves, and play again a leading part. 

In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer 
time, the course of affairs was different. When the 
Roman Empire that was really Roman went down in 



Biological Analogies in History 27 

ruin, there followed an interval of centuries when the 
gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and 
frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work, 
of enervating self-indulgence, every form of vice and 
weakness which we regard as most ominous in the civili- 
zation of to-day, had been at work throughout Italy for 
generations. The Nation had lost all patriotism. It had 
ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to 
bring forth men of mark of any kind; and the remnant 
of the Italian people cowered in helpless misery among 
the horse-hoofs of the barbarians, as the wild northern 
bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the cities 
for a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of his- 
tory ; but in the end it was seen that what came had been 
in part change and growth. It was not all mere destruc- 
tion. Not only did Rome leave a vast heritage of lan- 
guage, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern world; but 
the people of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain 
in their veins. In a few centuries came a wonderful new 
birth for Italy. Then for four or five hundred years 
there was a growth of many little city states which, in 
their energy both in peace and war, in their fierce, fervent 
life, in the high quality of their men of arts and letters, 
and in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve 
order among themselves or to repel outside invasion, can 
not unfairly be compared with classic Greece. Again 
Italy fell, and the land was ruled by Spaniard or French- 
man or Austrian; and again, in the nineteenth century, 
there came for the third time a wonderful new birth. 

Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old 
home, and in certain lands which it had conquered, with 
its utter disappearance in certain other lands where it was 
intrusive, but where it at one time seemed as firmly estab- 
lished as in Italy— certainly as in Spain or Gaul. No 



28 Biological Analogies in History 

more curious example of the growth and disappearance 
of a national type can be found than in the case of the 
Graeco-Roman dominion in Western Asia and North 
Africa. All told it extended over nearly a thousand 
years, from the days of Alexander till after the time of 
Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet remain the 
ruins of innumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted 
that dominion must once have been. The overshadowing 
and far-reaching importance of what occurred is suffi- 
ciently shown by the familiar fact that the New Testa- 
ment was written in Greek ; while to the early Christians, 
North Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or 
the Valley of the Po. The intrusive peoples and their 
culture flourished in the lands for a period twice as long 
as that which has elapsed since, with the voyage of 
Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have 
begun; and then they withered like dry grass before the 
flame of the Arab invasion, and their place knew them no 
more. They overshadowed the ground ; they vanished ; 
and the old types reappeared in their old homes, with 
beside them a new type, the Arab. 

Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure of 
the main facts. We know that the Hollander remains in 
Holland, though the greatness of Holland has passed; we 
know that the Latin blood remains in Italy, whether to a 
greater or less extent ; and that the Latin culture has died 
out in the African realm it once won, while it has lasted 
in Spain and France, and thence has extended itself to 
continents beyond the ocean. We may not know the 
causes of the facts, save partially; but the facts themselves 
we do know. But there are other cases in which we are 
at present ignorant even of the facts; we do not know 
what the changes really were, still less the hidden causes 
and meaning of these changes. Much remains to be 



Biological Analogies in History 29 

found out before we can speak with any certainty as to 
whether some changes mean the actual dying out or the 
mere transformation of types. It is, for instance, aston- 
ishing how Httle permanent change in the physical 
make-up of the people seems to have been worked in 
Europe by the migrations of the races in historic times. 
A tall, fair-haired, long-skulled race penetrates to some 
southern country and establishes a commonwealth. The 
generations pass. There is no violent revolution, no 
break in continuity of history, nothing in the written 
records to indicate an epoch-making change at any given 
moment; and yet after a time we find that the old type 
has reappeared and that the people of the locality do not 
substantially differ in physical form from the people of 
other localities that did not suffer such an invasion. Does 
this mean that gradually the children of the invaders have 
dwindled and died out ; or, as the blood is mixed with the 
ancient blood, has there been a change, part reversion and 
part assimilation, to the ancient type in its old surround- 
ings? Do tint of skin, eyes and hair, shape of skull, and 
stature, change in the new environment, so as to be like 
those of the older people who dwelt in this environment? 
Do the intrusive races, without change of blood, tend 
under the pressure of their new surroundings to change 
in type so as to resemble the ancient people of the land? 
Or, as the strains mingled, has the new strain dwindled 
and vanished, from causes as yet obscure? Has the 
blood of the Lombard practically disappeared from Italy, 
and of the Visigoth from Spain, or does it still flow in 
large populations where the old physical type has once 
more become dominant? Here in England, the long- 
skulled men of the long barrows, the short-skulled men 
of the round barrows, have they blended, or has one or 
the other type actually died out; or are they merged in 



30 Biological Analogies in History 

some older race which they seemingly supplanted, or have 
they adopted the tongue and civilization of some later 
race which seemingly destroyed them? We cannot say. 
We do not know which of the widely different stocks 
now speaking Aryan tongues represents in physical char- 
acteristics the ancient Aryan type, nor where the type 
originated, nor how or w'hy it imposed its language on 
other types, nor how much or how little mixture of blood 
accompanied the change of tongue. 

The phenomena of national growth and decay, both 
those which can and those which cannot be explained, 
have been peculiarly in evidence during the four cen- 
turies that have gone by since the discovery of America 
and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These 
have been the four centuries of by far the most intense 
and constantly accelerating rapidity of movement and 
development that the w^orld has yet seen. The move- 
ment has covered all the fields of human activity. It has 
witnessed an altogether unexampled spread of civilized 
mankind over the world, as well as an altogether unex- 
ampled advance in man's dominion over nature ; and this 
together with a literary and artistic activity to be matched 
in but one previous epoch. This period of extension and 
development has been that of one race, the so-called white 
race, or, to speak more accurately, the group of peoples 
living in Europe, who undoubtedly have a certain kinship 
of blood, W'ho profess the Christian religion, and trace 
back their culture to Greece and Rome. 

The memories of men are short, and it is easy to forget 
how brief is this period of unquestioned supremacy of the 
so-called white race. It is but a thing of yesterday. Dur- 
ing the thousand years which w^ent before the opening of 
this era of European supremacy, the attitude of Asia and 
Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and Tartar, Arab and 



Biological Analogies in History 31 

Moor, had on the whole been that of successful aggres- 
sion against Europe. More than a century went by after 
the voyages of Columbus before the mastery in war 
began to pass from the Asiatic to the European. During 
that time Europe produced no generals or conquerors able 
to stand comparison with Selim and Solyman, Baber and 
Akbar. Then the European advance gathered mo- 
mentum; until at the present time peoples of European 
blood hold dominion over all America and Australia and 
the islands of the sea, over most of Africa, and the major 
half of Asia. Much of this world conquest is merely 
political, and such a conquest is always likely in the long- 
run to vanish. But ver}^ much of it represents not a 
merely political, but an ethnic conquest ; the intrusive peo- 
ple having either exterminated or driven out the con- 
quered peoples, or else having imposed upon them its 
tongue, law, culture, and religion, together with a strain 
of its blood. During this period substantially all of the 
world achievements worth remembering are to be credited 
to the people of European descent. The first exception 
of any consequence is the wonderful rise of Japan within 
the last generation — a phenomenon unexampled in his- 
tory ; for both in blood and in culture the Japanese line of 
ancestral descent is as remote as possible from ours, and 
yet Japan, while hitherto keeping most of what was 
strongest in her ancient character and traditions, has as- 
similated with curious completeness most of the charac- 
teristics that have given power and leadership to the West. 
During this period of intense and feverish activity 
among the peoples of European stock, first one and then 
another has taken the lead. The movement began with 
Spain and Portugal. Their flowering time was as brief 
as it was wonderful. The gorgeous pages of their annals 
are illumined by the figures of warriors, explorers, states- 



32 Biological Analogies in History 

men, poets, and painters. Then their days of greatness 
ceased. Many partial explanations can be given, but 
something remains behind, some hidden force for evil, 
some hidden source of weakness upon which we cannot 
lay our hands. Yet there are many signs that in the 
New W^orld, after centuries of arrested growth, the peo- 
ples of Spanish and Portuguese stock are entering upon 
another era of development, and there are other signs 
that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself. 

About the time that the first brilliant period of the 
leadership of the Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, 
at the other end of Europe, in the land of melancholy 
steppe and melancholy forest, the Slav turned in his 
troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp leader- 
ship and dominion. Since then almost every nation of 
Europe has at one time or another sought a place in the 
movement of expansion; but for the last three centuries 
the great phenomenon of mankind has been the growth 
of the English-speaking peoples and their spread over the 
world's waste spaces. 

Comparison is often made between the Empire of 
Britain and the Empire of Rome. When judged rela- 
tively to the effect on all modern civilization, the Empire 
of Rome is of course the more important, simply because 
all the nations of Europe and their offshoots in other 
continents trace back their culture either to the earlier 
Rome by the Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. 
The Empire of Rome is the most stupendous fact in lay 
history ; no empire later in time can be compared with it. 
But this is merely another way of saying that the nearer 
the source the more important becomes any deflection of 
the stream's current. Absolutely, comparing the two 
empires one with the other in point of actual achievement, 
and disregarding the immensely increased effect on other 



Biological Analogies in History 33 

civilizations which inhered in the older empire because it 
antedated the younger by a couple of thousand years, 
there is little to choose between them as regards the wide 
and abounding interest and importance of their careers. 

In the world of antiquity each great empire rose when 
its predecessor had already crumbled. By the time that 
Rome loomed large over the horizon of history, there were 
left for her to contend with only decaying civilizations 
and raw barbarisms. WTien she conquered Pyrrhus she 
strove against the strength of but one of the many frag- 
ments into which Alexander's kingdom had fallen. WTien 
she conquered Carthage she overthrew a foe against 
whom for two centuries the single Greek city of Syracuse 
had contended on equal terms; it was not the Sepoy 
armies of the Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering 
genius of the House of Barca, which rendered the strug- 
gle forever memorable. It was the distance and the 
desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen, that set 
bounds to Rome in the east ; and on the north her advance 
was curbed by the vast reaches of marshy woodland, 
rather than by the tall barbarians who dwelt therein. 
During the long generations of her greatness, and until 
the sword dropped from her withered hand, the Parthian 
was never a menace of aggression, and the German 
threatened her but to die. 

On the contrary, the great expansion of England has 
occurred, the great empire of Britain has been achieved, 
during the centuries that have also seen mighty military 
nations rise and flourish on the continent of Europe. 
It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping the empire 
she won between the days of Scipio and the days of 
Trajan, had at the same time held her own with the 
Nineveh of Sargon and Tiglath, the Egy-pt of Thothmes 
and Rameses. and the kingrdoms of Persia and Macedon 



34 Biological Analogies in History 

in the red flush of their warrior-dawn. The empire of 
Britain is vaster in space, in population, in wealth, in 
wide variety of possession, in a history of multiplied and 
manifold achievement of every kind, than even the glo- 
rious empire of Rome. Yet, unlike Rome, Britain has 
won dominion in every clime, has carried her flag by 
conquest and settlement to the uttermost ends of the 
earth, at the very time that haughty and powerful rivals, 
in their abounding youth or strong maturity, were eager 
to set bounds to her greatness, and to tear from her what 
she had won afar. England has peopled continents with 
her children, has swayed the destinies of teeming myriads 
of alien race, has ruled ancient monarchies, and wrested 
from all comers the right to the world's waste spaces, 
while at home she has held her own before nations, 
each of military power comparable to Rome's at her 
zenith. 

Rome fell by attack from without only because the 
ills within her own borders had grown incurable. What 
is true of your country, my hearers, is true of my own; 
while we should be vigilant against foes from without, 
yet we need never really fear them so long as we safe- 
guard ourselves against the enemies within our own 
households ; and these enemies are our own passions and 
follies. Free peoples can escape being mastered by others 
only by being able to master themselves. We Americans 
and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep 
in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to 
the success of a great democracy, and second only to a 
high and stern sense of duty, of moral obligation, are 
self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my hosts, and I, 
may not agree in all our views ; some of you would think 
me a very radical democrat — as, for the matter of that, 
I am— and my theory of imperialism would probably suit 



Biological Analogies in History 35 

the anti-imperialists as little as it would suit a certain type 
of forcible- feeble imperialist. But there are some points 
on which we must all agree if we think soundly. The 
precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is 
the instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is 
important to have a good tool. But, even if it is the 
best possible, it is only a tool. No implement can ever 
take the place of the guiding intelligence that wields it. 
A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman ; 
but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last 
analysis the all-important factor in national greatness is 
national character. 

There are questions which we of the great civilized 
nations are ever tempted to ask of the future. Is our 
time of growth drawing to an end? Are we as nations 
soon to come under the rule of that great law of death 
which is itself but part of the great law of life? None 
can tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that 
are hidden or that can but dimly be apprehended, are at 
work all around us, both for good and for evil. The 
growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for vapid and 
frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The 
most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in 
the rate of natural increase, now to a larger or lesser 
degree shared by most of the civilized nations of Central 
and Western Europe, of America and Australia; a dimin- 
ution so great that if it continues for the next century at 
the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years, 
all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or 
else have begun to go backward in population, while many 
of them will have already gone very far backward. 

There is much that should give us concern for the 
future. But there is much also which should give us 
hope. No man is more apt to be mistaken than the 



36 Biological Analogies in History 

prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in 1830, 
Niebuhr hazarded the guess that all civilization v^^as about 
to go dow^n with a crash, that we were all about to share 
the fall of third and fourth-century Rome— a respectable, 
but painfully overworked, comparison. The fears once 
expressed by the followers of Malthus as to the future 
of the world have proved groundless as regards the civil- 
ized portion of the world; it is strange indeed to look 
back at Carlyle's prophecies of some seventy years ago, 
and then think of the teeming life of achievement, the life 
of conquest of every kind, and of noble effort crowned by 
success, which has been ours for the two generations since 
he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had been 
told and all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really 
worth doing had been done. I believe with all my heart 
that a great future remains for us; but whether it does 
or does not, our duty is not altered. However the battle 
may go, the soldier worthy of the name will with utmost 
vigour do his allotted task, and bear himself as valiantly 
in defeat as in victory. Come what will, we belong to 
peoples who have not yielded to the craven fear of being 
great. In the ages that have gone by, the great nations, 
the nations that have expanded and that have played a 
mighty part in the world, have in the end grown old and 
weakened and vanished ; but so have the nations whose 
only thought was to avoid all danger, all effort, who 
would risk nothing, and who therefore gained nothing. 
In the end, the same fate may overwhelm all alike; but 
the memory of the one type perishes with it, while the 
other leaves its mark deep on the history of all the future 
of mankind. 

A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and 
even though in the physical sense it die utterly, it may 
yet hand down a history of heroic achievement, and for 



Biological Analogies in History 37 

all time to come may profoundly influence the nations 
that arise in its place by the impress of what it has done. 
Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the same time 
to see our blood live young and vital in men and women 
fit to take up the task as we lay it down ; for so shall our 
seed inherit the earth. But if this, which is best, is denied 
us, then at least it is ours to remember that if we choose 
we can be torch-bearers, as our fathers were before us. 
The torch has been handed on from nation to nation, 
from civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded 
time, from the dim years before history dawned down to 
the blazing splendour of this teeming century of ours. It 
dropped from the hands of the coward and the sluggard, 
of the man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the man 
whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it has 
been kept alight only by those who were mighty of heart 
and cunning of hand. What they worked at, provided 
it was worth doing at all, was of less matter than how 
they worked, whether in the realm of the mind or the 
realm of the body. If their work was good, if what they 
achieved was of substance, then high success was really 
theirs. 

In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogies 
between what has occurred to forms of animal life throusfh 
the procession of the ages on this planet, and what has 
occurred and is occurring to the great artificial civiliza- 
tions which have gradually spread over the world's sur- 
face, during the thousands of years that have elapsed 
since cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the 
Nile and the Euphrates, and the harbours of Minoan 
Crete bristled with the masts of the Aegean craft. But 
of course the parallel is true only in the roughest and 
most general way. Moreover, even between the civiliza- 
tions of to-day and the civilizations of ancient times, 



38 Biological Analogies in History 

there are differences so profound that we must be cautious 
in drawing any conclusions for the present based on 
what has happened in the past. While freely admitting 
all of our follies and weaknesses of to-day, it is yet mere 
perversity to refuse to realize the incredible advance that 
has been made in ethical standards. I do not believe that 
there is the slightest necessary connexion between any 
weakening of virile force and this advance in the moral 
standard, this growth of the sense of obligation to one's 
neighbour and of reluctance to do that neighbour wrong. 
We need have scant patience with that silly cynicism 
which insists that kindliness of character only accom- 
panies weakness of character. On the contrary, just as 
in private life many of the men of strongest character are 
the very men of loftiest and most exalted morality, so I 
believe that in national life as the ages go by we shall 
find that the permanent national types will more and more 
tend to become those in which, though intellect stands 
high, character stands higher; in which rugged strength 
and courage, rugged capacity to resist wrongful aggres- 
sion by others will go hand in hand with a lofty scorn of 
doing wrong to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of 
Hampden, of Washington and Lincoln. These were as 
good men, as disinterested and unselfish men, as ever 
served a State ; and they were also as strong men as ever 
founded or saved a State. Surely such examples prove 
that there is nothing Utopian in our effort to combine 
justice and strength in the same nation. The really high 
civilizations must themselves supply the antidote to the 
self-indulgence and love of ease which they tend to pro- 
duce. 

Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible 
problems to solve within its own borders, problems that 
arise not merely from juxtaposition of poverty and riches. 



Biological Analogies in History 39 

but especially from the self -consciousness of both poverty 
and riches. Each nation must deal with these matters in 
its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which the problem 
is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It 
must be a spirit of broad humanity; of brotherly kind- 
ness; of acceptance of responsibility, one for each and 
each for all; and at the same time a spirit as remote as 
the poles from every form of weakness and sentimentality. 
As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong to 
the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so 
in civil affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice 
to give to the lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull- 
witted, a reward which is really the robbery of what 
braver, wiser, abler men have earned. The only effective 
way to help any man is to help him to help himself; and 
the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be perma- 
nently helped at the expense of some one else. True 
liberty shows itself to best advantage in protecting the 
rights of others, and especially of minorities. Privilege 
should not be tolerated because it is to the advantage of 
a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage of a 
majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or 
freedom of contract can stand in the way of our cutting 
out abuses from the body politic. Just as little can we 
afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible — and 
incidentally of a highly undesirable — social revolution, 
which in destroying individual rights — including property 
rights — and the family, would destroy the two chief 
agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief rea- 
sons why either the advance or the preservation of man- 
kind is worth while. It is an evil and a dreadful thing to 
be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our duty 
to do all things possible for the betterment of social con- 
ditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive 



40 Biological Analogies in History 

for this betterment by means so destructive that they 
would leave no social conditions to better. In dealing 
with all these social problems, with the intimate relations 
of the family, with wealth in private use and business use, 
with labour, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to 
remember that though hardness of heart is a great evil it 
is no greater an evil than softness of head. 

But in addition to these problems, the most intimate 
and important of all, and which to a larger or less degree 
affect all the modern nations somewhat alike, we of the 
great nations that have expanded, that are now in com- 
plicated relations with one another and with alien races, 
have special problems and special duties of our own. You 
belong to a nation which possesses the greatest empire 
upon which the sun has ever shone. I belong to a nation 
which is trying on a scale hitherto unexampled to work 
out the problems of government for, of, and by the people, 
while at the same time doing the international duty of a 
great power. But there are certain problems which both 
of us have to solve, and as to which our standards should 
be the same. The Englishman, the man of the British 
Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and the Ameri- 
can, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact 
with utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more 
ancient than our own, others still in, or having but re- 
cently arisen from, the barbarism which our people left 
behind ages ago. The problems that arise are of well- 
nigh inconceivable difficulty. They cannot be solved by 
the foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with 
little patent recipes, and those cut-and-dried theories of 
the political nursery which have such limited applicability 
amid the crash of elemental forces. Neither can they be 
solved by the raw brutality of the men who, whether at 
home or on the rough frontier of civilization, adopt 



Biological Analogies in History 41 

might as the only standard of right in dealing with other 
men, and treat alien races only as subjects for exploita- 
tion. 

No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all 
alien races, because they differ from one another far 
more widely than some of them differ from us. But 
there are one or two rules which must not be forgotten. 
In the long run there can be no justification for one race 
managing or controlling another unless the management 
and control are exercised in the interest and for the 
benefit of that other race. This is what our peoples have 
in the main done, and must continue in the future in even 
greater degree to do, in India, Egypt, and the Philippines 
alike. In the next place, as regards every race, every- 
where, at home or abroad, we cannot afford to deviate 
from the great rule of righteousness which bids us treat 
each man on his worth as a man. He must not be senti- 
mentally favoured because he belongs to a given race ; he 
must not be given immunity in wrongdoing or permitted 
to cumber the ground, or given other privileges which 
would be denied to the vicious and unfit among ourselves. 
On the other hand, where he acts in a way which would 
entitle him to respect and reward if he was one of our 
own stock, he is justly as entitled to that respect and 
reward if he comes of another stock, even though *^^hat 
other stock produces a much smaller proportion of men 
of his type than does our own. This has nothing to do 
with social intermingling, with what is called social 
equality. It has to do merely with the question of doing 
to each man and each woman that elementary justice 
which will permit him or her to gain from life the reward 
which should always accompany thrift, sobriety, self- 
control, respect for the rights of others, and hard and 
intelligent work to a given end. To more than such just 



42 Biological Analogies in History 

treatment no man is entitled, and less than such just treat- 
ment no man should receive. 

The other type of duty is the international duty, the 
duty owed by one nation to another. I hold that the laws 
of morality which should govern individuals in their deal- 
ings one with the other, are just as binding concerning 
nations in their dealings one with the other. The appli- 
cation of the moral law must be different in the two 
cases, because in one case it has, and in the other it has 
not, the sanction of a civil law with force behind it. The 
individual can depend for his rights upon the courts, 
which themselves derive their force from the police power 
of the State. The nation can depend upon nothing of the 
kind; and therefore, as things are now, it is the highest 
duty of the most advanced and freest peoples to keep 
themselves in such a state of readiness as to forbid to any 
barbarism or despotism the hope of arresting the progress 
of the world by striking down the nations that lead in 
that progress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to 
the unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun 
by the very peoples who, of all others, should not be left 
helpless before any possible foe. But we must reprobate 
quite as strongly both the leaders and the peoples who 
practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and ini- 
quity by the strong at the expense of the weak. We 
should tolerate lawlessness and wickedness neither by 
the weak nor by the strong; and both weak and strong 
we should in return treat with scrupulous fairness. The 
foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country 
should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honour, 
of insistence upon one's own rights and of respect for 
the rights of others, that marks the conduct of a brave 
and honourable man when dealing with his fellows. Per- 
mit me to support this statement out of my own ex- 



Biological Analogies in History 43 

perience. For nearly eight years I was the head of a 
great nation, and charged especially with the conduct 
of its foreign policy; and during those years I took no 
action with reference to any other people on the face 
of the earth that I would not have felt justified in taking 
as an individual in dealing with other individuals. 

I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to- 
day have a right to feel that long careers of achievement 
lie before our several countries. To each of us is vouch- 
safed the honourable privilege of doing his part, however 
small, in that work. Let us strive hardily for success 
even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer 
souls of small endeavour who know neither failure nor 
success. Let us hope that our own blood shall continue 
in the land, that our children and children's children to 
endless generations shall arise to take our places and play 
a mighty and dominant part in the world. But whether 
this be denied or granted by the years we shall not see, 
let at least the satisfaction be ours that we have carried 
onward the lighted torch in our own day and generation. 
If we do this, then, as our eyes close, and we go out into 
the darkness, and others' hands grasp the torch, at least 
we can say that our part has been borne well and valiantly. 



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